


And I Feel Fine

by misura



Category: Primeval
Genre: Apocalypse, Community: smallfandomfest, M/M, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-02
Updated: 2010-07-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"The anomalies validate the future."</i> (Nick and Lester and the ends of the worlds)</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Feel Fine

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: _Nick/Lester, Helen's failure means the terrible vision of the future starts to come true_

The world ends in a deluge of paperwork, and Lester thinks he could almost have been happy at how orderly it all is, how neatly arranged, how well-prepared they all are, to have forms for each and every eventuality - from people coming back from the dead (loathe as he is to admit it, the ARC simply wouldn't have been the same without Connor) to the Home Office needing to spring for a monthly purchase of two-hundred bales of hay to feed a small herd of some-creature-or-anothers (Lester doesn't bother remembering the names; he's got people for that, and plausible deniability to think of).

Paperwork's nice and familiar; he can lose himself in it and not think about what the words really mean.

 

"You threw out my Spiderman comics," Connor says.

Of course, sometimes Lester feels this silly, idiotic urge to go and get a cup of coffee.

"I did?" Lester's hardly ever _not_ regretted allowing Connor to move in with him. "Good God, what _can_ I have been thinking?"

Connor looks like the kind of person wholly unfamiliar with the concept of sarcasm. "Well, I was kind of dead for a while. But. Good as new now. Anyway, Abby saved them for me."

"She did, did she?" It would be closer to the truth to say that Lester dropped the boxes off at her apartment, after a polite inquiry if she'd like to have them, which ended with her crying on Lester's shoulder and Lester telling himself that one of these days, it might be his daughter needing that shoulder, so he might as well get in a bit of practice now. "Have you considered proposing?"

"Proposing what?" Connor asks.

Some people, Lester reflects, really never change.

 

According to several scientists who ought to know better by now, it's quite impossible for insects to become larger than the sizes by which they've been known to mankind for four-thousand years, give or take a few decennia, and ignoring the kind of stories everybody knows were just invented by parents to scare their kids into finishing their Brussel sprouts, or whatever passed for healthy food at the time.

Lester's still got the tape of the interview during which several insects that couldn't possibly exist invaded the studio to demonstrate they did, in fact, exist and might be a trifle angry about all this talk of their not being real - although Lester rather thinks they were rather unpleasant to start with.

Someone getting their heads bitten off has never been a laughing matter, but sometimes, Lester watches the tape to remind him that words, no matter how reassuring, are only as reliable as the people speaking them.

 

"I thought I'd told you to report to me two hours ago." It annoys Lester when Nick makes him worry. He's got two kids, an ex-wife, a handful of people he owes favors to, a rather larger group of people who owe _him_ favors, many acquaintances and so, all in all, exactly three people in the world he might admit to give a damn about, because Muriel's met this new guy who is absolutely nothing like Lester (works as a vet at an animal shelter or something like that) and Lester will be damned if he admits to still caring about someone who's so obviously over him. "What happened?"

"Nothing." Nick sounds wholly unaware of any wrong-doing on his part. "I didn't have anything to report two hours ago, either. Wasn't going to call at all, but Stephen said you might be worried."

Stephen is a _saint_. If he had any kind of foot-fetish, Lester might offer to kiss his feet. Metaphorically. And only in part because it might make Nick a little jealous to have Lester kissing any part of his self-appointed bodyguard.

"You had _good news_ and you thought I wouldn't want to know?"

Nick completely misses the point, as he does so often. "I didn't have _any_ news."

 _'You are alive and unharmed,'_ Lester doesn't say. _'That's kind of nice to hear. I don't take that kind of thing for granted, you know. Not anymore.'_

"Well, I guess we'll see you all soon, then," he says instead.

"I guess you will," Nick replies.

 

Step one in the plan of how to deal with an alien invasion is diplomacy.

Giant insects aren't exactly aliens, obviously, only the thing is (Whitehall seems to reason, without bothering to consult Lester) they _could be_. Great Britain, the Prime Minister announces on TV, has no interest in playing the blame game such as _certain other_ nations are doing. It doesn't matter where the creatures come from (although obviously, they're not British and nobody British had anything to do with where they came from whatsoever). Great Britain's going to make 'first contact'.

It's bloody obvious the Prime Minister's never watched even a single episode of _Doctor Who_. (Lester doesn't approve of _Torchwood_ himself; there's simply no realism to it, but _Doctor Who_ is classic family entertainment, and Lester quite likes the idea of the Tardis as a controllable anomaly.)

 

"Obviously, this situation requires us to think outside the box."

Lester isn't sure why he's been drafted into a committee to come up with ways to 'neutralize' the problem of the giant insects. (There's a fancy term used by scientists who are now cautiously admitting that maybe there _are_ circumstances under which insects might outgrow the kind of sizes where you can keep them in a jar or swat them with a slipper, only nobody uses it.)

He's got anomalies to monitor; he hasn't got the time for this kind of nonsense.

"Don't think about bombs or gas - think ecological."

Worse: he's got an inkling of an idea. He's read the reports; he's seen the footage. He's read and reread every word Helen Cutter has told them, about the future Nick's death might have prevented.

"Think natural predators," the supposed leader of the committee says, all earnest and bright-eyed and empty-headed and without any clue that Lester could tell him about 'natural predators' all right.

 

Muriel doesn't know about the mammoth, of course. She just thinks he's gotten the kids an elephant.

They call it 'Mr Woolsey' and Lester keeps it on a stretch of land well away from anyone who might recognize it for something that is not, in fact, any kind of elephant.

He tells his kids the truth, of course. That it's a mammoth, that it saved his life, and that it can't go home right now, but that one day, it will.

They believe every word and solemnly swear to never tell anyone else. Kids are easy like that.

 

"James? A word, if you please."

Lester is rather determined to get home early tonight. To get less than five hours of sleep impairs his ability to make sound decisions and (more importantly) to intimidate people into doing what he tells them to do without putting up an argument, provided they're not Nick.

To get no sex for more than a month impairs his ability to keep from murdering someone though and to not do anything so undignified as to initiate a sexual encounter at work. Thus, the plan is to arrive at his flat eight hours in advance of his needing to leave for work.

"Christine." He gives her a smile that says _'you are inconveniencing me greatly'_. "Of course."

 _'I know,'_ her smile says. "Shall we sit down for a cup of coffee?"

"By all means." Rumor has it she's been currying favor with the Prime Minister recently, who should be old and wise enough to know there's only one reason women show an interest in him nowadays. Lester's had lunch with the man's wife a few times these past months, to do some currying of his own - in an entirely platonic kind of way, naturally. He's reasonably confident he'll be able to cut whatever strings Christine may try to pull, provided he gets sufficient advance warning.

"Well," she says, sipping her coffee in a way that implies she's used to better.

"Quite," Lester says. He's used to worse coffee, actually - when the choice is between a new gun and a coffee machine, Lester is selfless enough to pick the gun.

Christine would probably simply go over budget. "You're not going to tell them, are you?"

"There is," Lester says, slowly and carefully, "nothing to tell."

"Natural predators, James." Christine likes using his first name as if he's got no title, as if he hasn't earned the right to be addressed as 'Sir'. "I think there is."

Lester says nothing. London is still reasonably safe, relatively untouched - two civil servants can sit here and have a cup of coffee (there's still coffee; that's something, too, although God only knows how long that's going to last; maybe he should start rationing the stuff).

 _'All it takes to end the world is one greedy civil servant,'_ Helen has told them.

Greedy.

What a miserably insufficient adjective to describe someone like Christine.

 

Communication with the insects is impossible. It doesn't surprise Lester - it _does_ surprise him how many people _do_ appear to be genuinely surprised by this bloody obvious flaw in the grand plan to solve the problem by diplomatic means. Real life isn't like _Doctor Who_ and anyway, the Doctor doesn't _really_ talk English all the time; that's just what it sounds like on TV for convenience's sake. Lester's not a geek, but he does know some basic stuff.

Other nations have already rolled out the heavy guns and, of course, the cannisters of pesticide.

Who cares about the ozone layer or the environment when the future of humankind's at stake? It's not, people tell one another, as if they've got a _choice_. It's kill or be killed now.

 

Captain Becker is a competent man - not too bright, but bright enough to be useful. It's purely a coincidence he's still keeping in touch with Christine's current head of security, of course. Lester wouldn't dream of asking him to use that connection to keep an eye on Christine's operations, and he definitely would never consider the possibility of Becker passing on a nicely mixed bag of true facts and fiction about what's going on over at the ARC.

Once he's got a reasonably complete picture, Lester writes up a report and passes it on to everyone who's anyone at the ARC.

"Neural clamps?" Nick asks, making it sound like some kinky sex toy he's determined to never let Lester use on him ever again. (It could be Lester's imagination, of course; the decontamination showers are looking better all the time as a location for a sexual encounter of the wet and soapy kind.)

"So it would seem," Lester says. It disturbs him how _tempting_ the idea is: put some sort of machine on a predator and turn it into your obedient watchdog. Still lethal, just no longer dangerous. Supposedly.

He wonders if Christine's kept a file with the names and pictures of the people who got killed to get her that gimmick in a working condition. These things never work on the first go, no matter how perfect your design is - and Christine's got no Connor, who may be annoying and terribly slow when it comes to figuring out women, but who's also sort of a genius when he's got Nick to feed him facts and ideas, and Lester to pay for his shopping.

 

The thing is: Helen may have been wrong.

Nothing anyone at the ARC has done is responsible for the giant insects showing up all over the world. Lester can see how they might make it worse, by bringing in the future predators, but at this point, the insects are doing a fine job of slowly driving humanity to the brink all by themselves.

Anomalies to the past are still opening up and closing again. Nick and Connor and Stephen are still clueless about what's causing them, let alone how to stop them.

Becker kills a creature on his first outing and gets yelled at by Nick for possibly having altered the past.

Lester decides he's glad Muriel and he decided not to have kids. Growing up is hard enough without the world ending all around you.

 

"They're herd animals, you know."

Helen and Mr Woolsey seem to get along rather well. Clearly, mammoths are rather poor judges of character. "I was aware of that, yes." He's done what he could, he thinks; the animal did save his life.

Helen nods, once. "How's Nick?"

"Busy." Lester scowls. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good, he supposes. Lester's only human though; he'd have liked to get some alone-time with Nick every once in a while.

"Stephen?" Lester wonders if she genuinely doesn't stay in touch with anyone else but him. She almost killed Nick, once, but Lester hardly thinks a woman like Helen would think too much of that. Perhaps she's still in love with him, or Stephen, or both of them.

Perhaps Lester's got people more deserving of his pity than Helen. "Still not dating anyone."

Her smile is small and sharp. Nothing like Christine's veneer of politeness; with Helen, what you see is what you get. Mostly. "Silly boy."

"That about takes care of the chit-chat, don't you think?" Lester wonders how Mr Woolsey would deal with a giant insect. "How's the future looking? Still the same old?"

"Nothing's changed." She shrugs, as if it doesn't really concern her.

 

Time as Lester understands it is linear. There's the past, the present and the future, and they all follow one another like good little schoolchildren. The anomalies are gateways - a moment's inattention from the teacher allowing the kids to trade places, to pass notes when they're not supposed to be talking.

Anomalies are anomalous. That's the whole point. It's in the bloody name.

 

"The number of anomalies are increasing." Nick calls him during dinner, and if Lester had truly believed in a God, he'd be demanding if one night - one _bloody_ night - was really that much to ask for. Nick's not even here; he's still at the ARC, working, and by the time he'll get home ( _if_ he gets home), Lester will be fast asleep.

Lester thinks that if he'd married Muriel, this is how she'd have felt most weekdays - except that he probably wouldn't even have called her, because she'd have known nothing about his work.

"Is that good or bad?" Lester asks, feeling like it's not a very intelligent question to ask, but not being quite sure of the answer all the same. There have been sightings of giant insects all over the world - not enough to pose any kind of threat yet, but enough to be a bit worrying.

Lester knows they're supposed to be from the future - some genetic experiment gone wrong - yet he also knows that yesterday's future might be today's tomorrow.

"They're opening and closing very fast," Nick says. "Connor's got a theory."

Lester waits for more. "Yes?"

"It involves aliens," Nick says.

 

Time according to Nick is a fourth dimension.

 

"It's really very elegant and simple and er kind of sexy," Connor says, looking as pleased as if he's invented time itself, instead of merely trying to explain the concept to Lester. "The anomalies were made by aliens."

 

Time according to Connor is made by aliens.

 

Nick looks like he's about to restart an argument that was old long before Lester walked into the room, so Lester decides to quickly cut to the chase. "How is that going to help us?"

As far as Lester's concerned, the anomalies could have been created by Santa's little helpers. He doesn't care. If Nick wants to care, he can do it in his own time.

"We - that is, Professor Cutter and I - think there's someone out there who's discovered how to reproduce the effect. And that that's what's causing all these problems we've been having."

Lester can't resist. "What does this have to do with aliens?"

"It's just a natural defense mechanism," Nick says, before Connor can explain that no, it isn't. "Someone's messing with time, so more anomalies open to restore the balance. And I still think it's just a result of the fault lines getting overloaded, not a mechanism at all."

"You can agree to disagree," Lester says. "What can we do to stop it?"

They both shrug and look at him the way his old Maths teacher used to. "Close the anomaly that shouldn't be there."

 

Helen has seen the future, and she's seen only destruction - abandoned ruins of cities, devoid of any life except the giant insects and the future predators, neither species one that ever should have been.

She knows the future predators have come from the ARC somehow, in some way. She knows Nick is at the heart of everything that happens at the ARC, knows that without Nick, the ARC would fall apart.

Kill Nick, kill the ARC, kill the future predators before they're ever created.

Kill the future predators before they're ever created, remove them from the timeline, remove the knowledge of what to do to keep them from ever being created from the timeline.

 _'The anomalies validate the past,'_ Nick keeps saying.

It's so very simple when she thinks about it.

 

"The anomalies validate the future."

"No, they don't," Nick says, almost immediately, which tells Lester he hasn't actually considered Helen's theory. "The future's completely different from the past." At least he seems to realize where Helen got her idea. "They're nothing alike. Time doesn't work like that."

Helen gives Nick a look that reminds Lester of his old boyfriend. Hard to remember how he ever put up with the man for close to eight years. Of all the things Lester can't stand, smug superiority is at the top of the list. "Time isn't linear, Nick. Do you know what time is?"

Connor raises his hand, as if he's in a classroom. Nick sends him a look of betrayal. Lester utterly fails to sympathize. Helen nods. Lester thinks he might detect a hint of a smile.

"Time is a fourth dimension," Connor says. "Or that's what Professor Cutter says, anyway," he adds.

"Nick?"

Nick makes this face he always makes when Lester makes him admit that, yes, he did rather enjoy last night, but that does not mean he wants to do anything of _that_ again this morning. Helen's probably seen it a few times, too. "Yes, all right, I did say that."

"Well, that's simple enough then, isn't it?" Christine will be waiting, Lester knows. She's got her anomaly, an unlimited amount of predators, and her neural clamps. She'll probably have a schedule all worked out in her mind, about when to go public with all of it, when to step up the savior of Britain, an army of tame predators at her back to fight off the insects.

A nice idea, if a little theatrical. And something will go wrong, of course, because honestly? Enslaving a race of dangerous predators to get rid of another race of dangerous predators? Lester doesn't even need to have _seen_ the future to know something like that can't possibly end well.

"Simple?" Nick asks.

 

Wilder is a good soldier. Luckily for Lester, he's also a reasonable man. It's a rare quality in a military man, so Lester makes a mental note to consider recruiting Wilder at a later date, seeing as how he'll shortly become unemployed and all.

Lester claims he wants to talk - Wilder agrees to a meeting - Becker taps him on the back of his head.

Simple? Absolutely.

 

They use Wilder's keycard to get inside. Once inside, they use Connor's anomaly-detector to detect the anomaly. Once they've detected the anomaly, they use Wilder's keycard some more, until they reach a point where they need to use Becker's gun instead (not to _shoot_ anyone, of course; that would be uncivilized, but Becker points it at people to remind them that it's polite to open doors and that works rather well, too).

They find one predator wearing a neural clamp. Becker shoots it. It dies.

On the top-floor of the building, they find the anomaly in a room full off strange-looking equipment. Nick and Connor poke at the equipment for a while, but someone seems to have set off some sort of alarm, so Lester simply tells them to stand back and let Becker do what he's really quite good at.

The anomaly closes.

Simple.

 

"No," Lester says. He thought it was difficult to deal with creatures from the past popping up out of nowhere - to discover that they need to worry about creatures from the future, too, is rather too much, he thinks.

"What do you mean: no?" Nick's accent is growing thicker, the way it always does when Nick's self-control is slipping. Under certain circumstances, Lester might admit he likes the way it sounds - or perhaps it's simply that he likes having an auditorial confirmation of what he can do to Nick. Lester likes to think that he himself is far better at hiding the effect Nick has on him sometimes.

Ryan looks impassive. Connor seems confused, Abby ... uneasy. Stephen, Lester hopes, will understand Lester's reasons. He's rather protective of Nick, Stephen is. Havng slept with someone's wife has that effect on some people.

"No, I'm not going to authorize an expedition into the past to find an anomaly that may lead to the future," Lester says. "We kill the young, as they're obviously too dangerous to keep alive, and we trust the past to take care of itself. After all, we're here, aren't we?"

He's gotten to Connor with that, he sees. Stephen is looking at Nick, who shakes his head. "It's not that simple."

"It is, actually," Lester tells him. Claudia's on his side, this time - taking the whole 'turns out the Professor is gay' thing rather better than Lester had expected, really - and she has her orders. It's unfortunate Helen got away with one of the young, but there's nothing to be done about that, for the moment.

"You can't make that decision," Nick says, but Lester knows he's winning this argument. Nick knows it, too. "You don't know what could happen - if those _things_ get loose in the past."

"They already are, aren't they?" Connor says. Nick glares at him. "I mean, that's what Helen said."

"Not the most trustworthy of witnesses," Lester says, "but in this case, I'm inclined to believe her. The past has happened, Professor, like it or not. Let's just stick to keeping the present safe, shall we?"

"Cutter." Lester's never quite worked out how Stephen feels about Lester's relationship with Nick. For now, the man seems to be on his side, though. "He's right."

Nick sighs, then nods, then looks at Lester in a way that promises no sex for at least a week. Petty.

Lester's ex-wife was like that, too, though, so Lester supposes he might be attracted to it in some strange and not entirely healthy way. He hopes his kids will turn out a bit more like himself.


End file.
